The Windows 10 Anniversary update adds a few features, including a major change to the company's voice assistant, Cortana. Users will now be able to ask Cortana for help even when their devices are locked, extending the assistant's usefulness and matching competitors. You won't have to be actively using your computer, phone or tablet to set reminders or check traffic.
Cortana is a cloud-based service, which calls out to online servers for everything. If you want to search your locally stored files and data, for example, Cortana does that using the cloud. This is already a privacy and security concern. So.... how does it help with either privacy or security, exactly, to let Cortana bypass your lock screen and perform e.g. a voice-commanded search?
If this is very limited, then maybe it's OK, but I see this being open to a lot of abuse. To me, this perfectly highlights one of the bigger problems with Windows 10: every useful feature comes with a privacy and security downside, which rather undermines the appeal of an OS that's billed as the most secure that Microsoft has ever made.
There are several other updates as well. Microsoft has updated its Edge browser, which replaced internet Explorer, and boasts that the new browser is so energy efficient that it can last "three hours longer than Google Chrome." It's also going to allow users to add extensions to the browser, starting with a small group that includes Pinterest's pinning button.
Let's just say that there are lots of asterisks on this one.
Security is another priority in the new system: Users will be able to sign in with their faces on certain websites that agree to use Microsoft's facial recognition technology. The update will also mean more notifications from Windows Defender, the built-in anti-malware service.
We live in a world where Mark Zuckerberg tapes over his webcam because of privacy concerns, and where many people don't even have webcams plugged into their desktop PCs, so I'm not sure how much use this will see.
The Anniversary update will also include more support for the stylus, with a Windows Ink suite that gives users more places throughout the system to use the pen. Gamers also get a few perks, including more support for Xbox Play Anywhere, which allows gamers to access the same games on the Xbox One and any Windows 10 device.Stylus and Ink may be interesting to some, although Adobe's Illustrator and Photoshop are the standard for people actually working with images on PC, so I have my doubts there. Play Anywhere is only useful for PC gamers that have also bought in to the XBox Live ecosystem -- something of a rarity, given that Steam became the name of PC gaming in the years when Microsoft was neglecting PC gamers.
Considering that the Anniversary Update is also killing Messaging Everywhere, a much-anticipated feature that PC users have been wanting (and Apple users enjoying) for years, in order to push a Skype service that people mostly don't like, instead... The whole A. Update looks like this: killing features that people want, to sell them services that they don't care about, and mixing new, sexy tech with privacy and security concerns that they don't want to talk about.
Worse, none of this will be added to the OS before the July 29th "free" upgrade deadline, so it's not as if people can be lured into switching in order to get access to all of this stuff right away, even if they did want it. If they're hoping to overcome a slow start (see my last blog post on that one) on their way to a billion Win10 users by their 2nd Anniversary, I have the feeling that they're going to need a lot more "game" than this.